What It Means If You Can See Faces In Objects

If you gaze for too long into pareidolia, pareidolia gazes also into you:

Let’s face it…

Humans perceive faces in random objects, even when no face is present, just the barest possible elements of one.

• Why we detect faces: facial recognition helps humans identify familiar people, interpret emotions and attention, and make rapid judgments about potential trustworthiness or aggression, so the brain is highly sensitive to face-like patterns.
• How we detect faces: specialized brain regions allow humans to detect faces in approximately one-tenth of a second, compared to around a quarter of a second for most other objects, but this sensitivity can cause the brain to perceive faces that don’t exist.

As for how prevalent this is, in one study cited in the video, participants reported seeing faces in over 35% of images containing only visual noise, demonstrating how readily the brain can interpret meaningless patterns as facial features.

As for false positives, magnetoencephalography studies found that the brain generally recognizes an illusory face as unreal within a quarter of a second, although the face may remain visible in the object even after the brain identifies the illusion.

Writer’s anecdotal addition:

I’m faceblind. I cannot visually process faces; I cannot tell one face from another, except by clunkily memorizing individual features, e.g. “this friend has a bigger nose, that one has plumper lips”, “this one has freckles”, “that one has darker skin”, etc. I cannot imagine anyone’s face from memory, not even my own, nor those of my loved ones.

^{(Counterpoint: in compensation for this, I am very perceptive of facial expressions and see things that most people miss, and can easily recognize/imagine the facial expressions of people I know. How do I do this without imagining the faces? It’s about the movements instead).}

However, I do still experience pareidolia. In fact, one day I saw my neighbor walking in the street. I could recognize her by her movements, but something seemed not quite right with her face, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, it was just a case of “something is different here but I’m not sure what”. Long story short, she was wearing a warm winter hat in a cute panda design, and I had mistaken its two eyes and a nose for her face, and not in a “split second mistake immediately corrected” fashion, but really scrutinizing it trying to work out what the difference was.

Anyway, for more on all of this (apart from the writer’s personal anecdote about her prosopagnosia), enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

How Reading Changes Your Brain, Unnaturally ← for some even stranger perception weirdnesses

Enjoy!